International Verify Your Backups Day

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Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2019/12/13/international-verify-your-backups-day/

What better day than Friday the 13th to check that your backups are actually working by restoring some critical files?

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6 posts were split to a new topic: What I use for backup

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I’m pleased to say that my Time Machine backups were in full working order when I needed to restore some data back in January after the purchase of a new iMac due to my old one breaking down. I also have an online backup via Backblaze as added insurance.

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How about Wednesday the 18th as a poor substitute? Booted to my CCC external drive so that I can do Clean Install on my internal hard drive. Boot was very slow but it got there.

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There’s never a bad time to test. :slight_smile:

First boots are often slow, but it may be faster on a subsequent one. Though of course external drives are almost always slower than internal drives too.

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My external firewire ssd is so much faster than my iMac internal disk that I now boot from the former and back up to the latter.

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Hey, it’s Friday the 13th! Have you verified your backups today? We’ll assume that most are working, but let us know if you discovered a failure.

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Great idea. Verified both my cloud and local Time Machine backups. The latter experience was a bit odd, but TM’s UI has always been a bit…unique.

When running through the backup date indicators (column on the right side of the TM window), at first nothing happened when I clicked on the BU from about a year ago. Uh, oh. So I tried something much more recent. The indicator for that BU date turned red when I pointed at it. Uh, oh again. But I went ahead and clicked, and that date’s window opened. So, I worked my way back in time. Every date indicator I pointed at was red, but every one of those dates’ windows opened. Finally got back to the original date I wanted, and now its indicator also turned red, and I was able to successfully restore a folder from that BU. Whew!

Not sure who thought using the color red to indicate an available backup was a good idea (like, how about green?), but the bottom line is I was able to verify TM is working properly.